Learner Connections and Interactions in an Open World Gaming Inspired Teacher Education Course
Dr. Gerald Ardito & Dr. Betul Czerkawski
Manhattanville College/The University of Arizona
Conceptual Framework

Research Questions
- What patterns of connections and interaction emerge between students and their instructor in an open world game type of instructional design?
- How are these connections and patterns of interactions the same and/or different than patterns of connections and interactions between students and their instructor in a more traditional type of instructional design?
The Context
- 14 teachers/teacher candidates in a course entitled “CS for Teachers”
- Conducted in a social learning platform built with Elgg software
- Spring 2016 semester
- Instructional design shaped by Arnab, et al. taxonomy
Taxonomy of Game Design Elements/Autonomy

The Methods
- Students participate in the course via a series of units focused on the history of CS in K-12 schools, core research, and coding via robotics.
- While they worked in this asynchronous course, they were able to interact with the teacher and one another.
- Those interactions were extracted and analyzed.
Data Analysis, part 1
- Social Network Analysis (SNA) - to visualize student networks for each learning activity
- Every interactions was coded (codebook to follow)
- Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) was used to visualize the epistemic space of each learning activity.
Data Analysis, part 2/Codebook

Findings - SNA, part 1/Reflection

Findings - SNA, part 2/Learning Logs
